Nielsen Exports Global Jobs to India

News, 23 October 2007

NEW YORK: The cost-cutting virus, endemic among multinational firms, has now infected The Nielsen Company, the largest player in global media and marketing research, which this week unveiled a massive ten-year deal to export US and European jobs to India.

The decision reflects two interrelated factors.

First, the fiscal anorexia inflicted by most private equity groups on their hapless acquisitions. And second, Nielsen's hiring in March of a new evp of global business services - Mitchell Habib, a name synonymous with the large-scale outsourcing of US jobs at Citigroup and General Electric .

Says Habib: "Nielsen is moving quickly to transform an outstanding group of operating businesses into an integrated, market-focused organisation that delivers high-value information services to our clients."

Perhaps inspired by the Sixth-Grade Student's Dictionary of Business Gobbledygook, Habib continued . . .

"This arrangement . . . will help us streamline and simplify our IT infrastructure and application platforms and operational practices across our businesses, support the development of integrated solutions and give us much greater flexibility to respond quickly to changes in the marketplace."

Meantime, some 8,000 miles distant from New York City there is much joy at the new custodian of the lost jobs: Tata Consultancy Services, which already handles a similar operation for Habib's former employer Citigroup.

TCS coo/executive director N Chandrasekaran, is himself no slouch at business gibberish: "The landmark agreement ... combines our traditional strength in IT services with our growing prowess in areas like infrastructure and enterprise transformation, consulting, and platform-based BPO.

"We will create a single platform to combine multiple operations relating to finance and accounts. We will also do the same for Nielsen's human resources. We will manage their information technology infrastructure and also offer consulting services such as helping out with analytics."

The deal is said to be the first single outsourcing contract for India worth more than $1 billion. But no-one is quantifying the number of jobs sacrificed on the altar of private equity profits.

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